Feature *SAE written form AAVE
Future tense marked for aspect
Future tense “fixing to” + non-finite
verbI am going to eat you,
ShineI’ma eat you, Shine
(Dundes 1990: 147)Are you (plural) getting
ready/about to eat?Y’all finna eat? (Green
2002: 70)
Negation strategies He didn’t go any further
than third or fourth gradeHe ain’t go no further
than third or fourth grade
(Rickford and Rickford
2000: 122)
No game lasts all night Don’t no game last all
night long (Green 2002:
78)^1
Possessive marker (‘s) deleted That’s the church’s
responsibilityThat’s the church
responsibility (Green
2002: 102)
Syntax - uninverted questions
invertedI asked Alvin if he could
goI as Alvin could he go
(Labov 1972a)Note:^1 Smitherman cites “I cain’t kill nothin and won’t nothin die,” as an example of an idiom
that originated in the AAVE oral tradition. It is an excellent example of multiple negation, but it
also is not easy to translate. The speaker is referring to his or her own bad luck.
In Spoken Soul, Rickford and Rickford point to more than three decades
of research as solid evidence “that listeners are able to identify accurately
the ethnicity of Black and white speakers on the basis of tape-recorded
samples of their speech, some less than 2.5 seconds long” (2000: 101–102,
241n).^3 Green (2002) provides a detailed look at AAVE pitch range, tone,
intonation and syllable structure, all contributing to the understanding of
AAVE as a language with a unique rhythm.^4 Work in linguistic profiling
adds weight to the common belief that it is usually possible to identify a
person’s race (and sometimes, ethnicity) on the basis of the spoken word
without visual cues (Anderson 2007; Baugh 2003; Chin 2010; Smalls
2004).
Middle-class African Americans may seldom or never use grammatical
features of AAVE, but such persons can still signal solidarity with the
greater African American community by careful engagement of discourse
strategies, intonation contour, and pitch. These strategies are what